Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom review: A farewell with a focus on fun

Things get harder, of course, when the supervillain known as Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) resurfaces with a frightening, magical new weapon and a plan to defeat Aquaman once and for all, avenging the death of the Big Bad’s father in the first movie. But it’s far from a simple revenge plot. Driven by dark forces he doesn’t fully understand, Black Manta is reshaping the entire planet in his quest for ultimate, Aquaman-destroying power, and if Arthur hopes to stop him, he has no choice but to break Orm out of jail and team up with his former enemy to save Atlantis, and by extension the world.

That little nugget of plot tease at the end there, Arthur busting Orm out of a strange desert prison and then taking him on an adventure, is the rocket fuel that keeps Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom shooting forward with swagger, humor, and heart. It’s not clear who on the story team deserves credit for turning a huge chunk of this film into a buddy road movie about two guys who slowly come to love each other, but it works like gangbusters, thanks in large part to the sheer amount of charm that comes from Momoa and Wilson sharing the screen together. With Arthur as the comedian and Orm as the straight man, they banter like crazy, get into trouble, and even find ways to slowly and organically form new bonds of respect. When the movie’s working with that formula, it’s absolute gold, both on a set piece and a character level.

Unfortunately, that part of the story comes a little too late, which brings us to the central issue that weighs down Lost Kingdom: Its scattershot, often frustrating plotting. This movie needs absolutely no help from the rest of the DCEU to become a complex web of characters, subplots, and various narrative ingredients that often carry little emotional or thematic weight for much of the runtime. The movie is, thankfully, not so long that it overstays its welcome, but it crams so much into two hours that you’re often left wondering how much of it we really needed, or whether or not some of it will come back in the end to make a big difference that, ultimately, never quite comes. Screenwriter David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, returning for his second Aquaman feature, deserves some kind of medal for making it all hold together in any graspable way, but even with his valiant efforts, the film can’t help but veer into overstuffed blockbuster territory.

The saving grace, of course, and the film’s biggest standout apart from Momoa and Wilson, is James Wan’s energetic, kid-in-a-candy-shop direction. This Aquaman has lost none of the sense of bombastic fun that made the first film so memorable. You can feel it radiating out not just from Momoa’s Hype Man enjoyment, but from the way Wan frames shots, layers in color, and plays up the sheer scope of the story he’s telling. This is a director who firmly believes that if you’re making a comic book movie about a guy who hangs out with aquatic creatures, you should absolutely team him up with a sassy octopus and a talking crab, and put him toe-to-toe with an underwater Jabba the Hutt voiced by Martin Short (no, I did not make that up). You should, in other words, have fun.

And above all else, Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom is fun. It does not dwell on its status as a finale for a certain comic book movie era, nor does it worry over the possibility that we’ll never see Momoa’s Arthur Curry again. Instead, this is a film that takes big swing after big swing, and leaves us filled up with spectacle, warmth, and a sense that the wait was probably worth it.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom opens in theaters December 22